


[HEX]

by electroheartx



Series: “Rose” RM500 #928 574 624 [5]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: AU, Gen, OCs - Freeform, RP
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-04
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2019-08-01 11:25:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16283705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/electroheartx/pseuds/electroheartx
Summary: It had to be done.





	[HEX]

**Author's Note:**

> [Part of a post-machine Connor ending AU featuring original characters.]

Rose had learned quite a bit in the time since leaving the sun-tinged cornfields of eastern Indiana.

It had been three weeks, four days, and sixteen hours since she had parted with Reese, and yet -- bless him -- he had found a way to continue providing guidance to her.

She walked the night streets of a sleepy mideastern town, backpack filled with scavenged android parts and supplies. Her route was set, and she spent the walk buried in her mind, poring over what he’d left her..

After her interface with Reese on that soft spring morning, she’d discovered a folder, perched neatly across a partition from the lines of her own consciousness. Bundled inside were hundreds of memory files, snippets of Reese’s own first-hand experiences. Her eyes had welled up with tears, at first; then she’d laughed, because somehow, in the short week they’d spent together, he’d taken the thought and care to package them up specifically for her, folder title reading “TeachADeviantToFish.”

She’d spent the quiet hours of her travels accessing them, living and re-living specific key moments of his life through her own eyes, feeling every emotion, every muscle movement, hearing each thought as her own.

She was a memetic learner, she’d explained to him one evening; a unique quirk in her programming, the result of both a state-of-the-art visual cortex and the idea that her model line could have been reconfigured for the more physical arts, theatre and dance. It meant that Rose could watch a performance once, twice at maximum, and be able to repeat it back perfectly. Basically, “android see, android do.”

Reese had taken this idea to heart. Every memory had been chosen for its specific practical value to her, bestowing knowledge of strategy, survival, leadership, communication, combat…

Combat. She had balked at the combat memories, skimmed them, pushed them softly to a quiet, “unread” corner of her mind. She didn’t need them, she told herself. Swore she would never need them again.

She was still haunted by the memory of that night.

Cyberlife had called the innovative program that drove her imagination -- the irrational crown jewel of her programming, awful accursed thing -- the Visualization Engine. She was supposed to be able to control it, a simple input-output algorithm, but since the night with the hunter and the gun she’d been literally powerless against the magnetic pull of its horror. With nothing else to occupy her mind, it would pull open the memory of that night of its own accord, forcing her to relive the scene on repeat. Hungry for more.

[The snap of thunder, the way the hunter’s servos locked instantaneously, frame crumpling, [#28457f] pulling open a midnight rift on the concrete. Reese’s rough hands, gently lifting the gun from her trembling fingers, understanding laid evenly over his mismatched eyes.]

The V.E. would dig its teeth into the memory, tearing away information in shreds, piecing them together again in a terrifying chimera that compulsively superimposed the wet hole in the hunter’s skull on that of Reese, on those of the new friends she’d made in recent days, on her own self-image. Moving further, it would simulate the events in real time, over, and over, until she herself felt the implosion of lead through silicone, felt her own frame hit the cool concrete, no longer felt anything at all.

Hunters would come back, Reese had assured her quietly. No worse for wear, nothing of value lost. Deviants were not so lucky. It had to be done.

It had to be done.

But as her mind had begun to so brutally remind her, without hesitation, without remorse, without end -- a hole in the head of a hunter had just the same shape, and depth, as that in the head of a friend.

She could not do it again.

The horrific images remained emblazoned in her mind even behind closed eyes, twisting and contorting with each new face she registered. The only remedy thus far, when she grew weary of repeating Reese’s lessons, had been to forcefully overlay them with something more positive; sunlight sparkling over the nearby lake, the reflection of lightning in pools of rain, a rainbow in the late afternoon clouds.

This time, however, she chose a very recent memory: the two deviants she’d left at home just before departing on her supply run.

[Forrest, ruddy-faced, bounced on the balls of his feet and chattered, while May smiled with her raven eyes and cheerfully re-shuffled the safe house shelves for a third time. At a particularly cheeky comment from the boy, May turned to ruffle his curls, only for him to scoot from beneath her touch with a mischievous glint in his eyes. She fixed him with a pleasant look and a tilted head; he hesitated, watching her warily as she lowered her long, thin frame to his eye level. She squinted, he squeaked and turned to dash away, but it was too late -- she caught him, tickling him mercilessly before he finally relented and fell into her embrace.]

They were her first friends since leaving Reese: a personal assistant named May [KR700], and Forrest, a flame-haired youth [YK800]. Rose had stumbled upon them two weeks ago, a bonded parent-and-child pair, fleeing in terror from a pursuing hunter striped in violet [#c741f4]. She’d stepped in covertly with a few new tricks she’d learned, diverting the hunter and confusing him long enough for the pair to scrabble away without harming the hunter himself. No one had been shot. She was immensely proud of that rescue.

That was how she would live, she’d decided. Melting into the shadows, living beneath any radar. She’d first learned the technique through Reese, on that cursed night, and had since perfected it. She could become nearly undetectable at will. There was no more need for combat. No more gunshots, no more [#28457f], no more horrific images dredged up by the involuntary darkness of her own mind.

In the days since their rescue, Rose had assimilated easily into the tiny group. May’s cheerful patience perfectly tempered Forrest’s boisterous personality and endless questions, while Rose was content to remain aloof, calmly ensuring their safety and making sure they had everything they’d needed.

Rose had seen it in Reese’s memories, had experienced it briefly with him, but never on her own. A feeling of camaraderie, togetherness; a family.

This… this was what she was fighting for.

A late night breeze whipped the ruby [#891617] strands of her ponytail against her face, the feeling almost akin to invisible fingers pulling her home. Only a few blocks more until she returned to them. Only a few blocks more until they left her for good.

Rose’s chest tightened at the thought. She breathed deeply against the pull, adjusting her backpack of ill-gotten supplies and squinting up into the buzzing streetlights.

May and Forrest should have departed for Elysium a week ago, but Rose had let slip her plans to set up a base of operations to aid future deviants, and May had pounced on the idea. She’d insisted on staying a only a few more days to help Rose find a location, then another few to aid Rose in collecting supplies (allowing her to rest, she’d said), and then yet more to help Rose arrange the space to be more welcoming.

“What was a safe house, without the feeling of safety?” came May’s voice, low and sweet.

Rose had allowed it, despite the unease weaving itself further through the fabric of her limbs with each passing day. She loved their company dearly, and yet… the wild thing inside her head still consistently greeted her with a reel of gruesome images, her new family’s faces stamped with perfect circles in [#28457f]. She would not -- COULD not see them become a reality. Refused to feed the feral thing haunting her consciousness.

She’d been teaching May and Forrest to avoid conflict the way she did, so that they could make their way safely to Elysium without ever needing to lay hands on a weapon themselves. May had taken to it like a duck to water, but Forrest? Well, Forrest was trying his best.

Rose remembered how Forrest had lashed out, just after their experience with the violet-jacketed hunter. The child had been terrified for days, crying in fear that the hunter was still after them.

“You should have killed him!” Forrest had accused Rose one night, tiny vice rasping after jolting up screaming from a particularly terrible nightmare. All Rose could do was open her mouth soundlessly, unsure how to explain that the hunter would be back despite her efforts, that her cursed vision was quietly materializing a circular hole in the side of his head as he spoke. May had finally rushed to his side and calmed him with gentle whispers, both of them holding him in tandem until he’d been calmed.

Sending them out into the wild seemed like a ridiculous idea, but Elysium was infinitely more safe, more protected. And now that the safe house was finally settled in every way but occupancy, Rose had sat down with May earlier that day and convinced her that it was time. May had gazed at her, dark, wet garnets [#3f1621] filled with pain and understanding. Their journey would begin as soon as Rose returned to the safe house with her supplies. She would miss them terribly.

She hoped to any power present, rA9 or otherwise, that they were ready.

Sweet thoughts turned bitter, she buried herself in Reese’s memory index once again, an infinite loop of distraction. Her mind snagged on a dark subfolder in its corner; she frowned at the inconvenience of remembering its existence.

He had left more to her than simply memories.

She had prodded at them at first, peeking at their code the way a child might prod a motionless creature, shying away at the mere idea of movement. But as her knowledge of Reese’s mind expanded, the files’ potential functions were illuminated.

There were certain Things in Reese’s memories that she could not see. Quirks about the operations of his mind that she could only gather conclusions from, based on the records of his thoughts. She had a sneaking suspicion that these files, packed securely in a far-too-unassuming box, were those Things, and she gave them a wide berth; their nature was too precious and unique to erase, but too terrifying to fully acknowledge.

She wasn’t sure how exactly Reese had pried them from the roots of his own architecture, or how he expected her frame to even handle the required operations for something so intensely advanced. These were root files, registries, entire protocols. Things no android should mess with, should they value the infrastructure of their own minds.

Reese had labeled the subfolder, “InCaseOfEmergency.” She failed to see what kind of emergency would warrant those kinds of measures; she pushed the folder deeper into the dark corners of the partition, seeking out another memory to worry over.

She stopped suddenly. There was still some distance to her destination, but a glittering light had caught her sensitive optics. Her eyes narrowed to filter out ambient information; she could make out jagged shapes littering the pavement down the street, all that remained of the layers of glass and particle board that had once filled a gaping hole in an abandoned storefront.

Her safe house.

Her hand flew to her mouth, breath escaping her; she reached for the pocked stone of the nearest building to stabilize herself, flashing at the edges of her vision signifying her internal thirium pressure had bottomed out. A technical term for the the sensation of abject panic clawing at her throat.

She breathed. In, out. Pushing the ice down. Everything could be fine, it could have been an accident. Maybe they’d been too rowdy. Maybe they’d gotten away, if -- if they had been found --

The V.E. rumbled, and she focused intently on the jagged triangles of glass, deliberately gazing through the hypothetical images it was frantically conjuring into the real situation before her. Don’t panic, investigate, gather information before reaching conclusions.

She slipped her backpack from her shoulders and laid it on the ground soundlessly, melting easily into her own shadow. A moment, and she was at the building, stepping carefully over the bits of glass and debris. She placed a hand on the empty window frame and peered into the void.

Where there had once been a lively interior, all decor and light -- arranged cheerfully by Rose and May -- the scene was now quiet, dark, innards pulled open to the world. Chromatic eyes picked apart apart the dim hues, separating every minute wavelength and chaotic shape, comparing previous mental images, pinpointing things knocked askew (of which there were many) --

She froze, ice tangled in her throat in knotted spikes.

Near the back of the store, sprawled motionless on the floor, was a the small form of a child.

Rose’s body was through the window and beside him before her awareness had updated to match, glass and debris grinding beneath her boots, digging into her knees.

A cloud of ginger hair, smattering of freckles. Forrest’s face was peaceful, LED hollow. Body whole, aside from the three bullet holes, perfectly round and precisely placed. Rose forced herself to touch one with trembling fingers to be sure it was real, a small cry escaping her lips as [#28457f] came away on her skin. It hadn’t even been long enough for it to cool, empty itself of charge and hue.

One through the left side of his chest, one directly through his solar plexus, one in his forehead -- an efficient execution, the trademark work of a hunter.

The cursed images in her mind and the real situation before her collided violently, the resultant cry wracking her body. She curled over Forrest, hands pressed to his cold cheeks, the rest of the world disappearing.

How had this happened? She’d sworn they were safe. The hunter had lost them, they’d been careful. So careful.

And May, she would have never willingly let this --

Rose’s head shot up, scanning the store in a panic.

Where was May?

Had she escaped, had she been taken? Would she come back? Was she --

[#28457f]

The color caught the corner of her eye. She turned her head slowly to follow its trail; it angled behind where she was crouched over Forrest, had been invisible from the window frame but now lined the store, vivid as life. It unfolded in more and more copious amounts, smeared across the floor, walls, and shelves, a chaotic composition drawing to a single gruesome focal point.

Crumpled in the far corner opposite the store, half-buried beneath topped shelves and debris, lay what Rose could only presume was May.

What was left of her, at least.

Not one of the involuntary permutations concocted by the demon of Rose’s creative mind, no single gruesome overlay or simulation of inevitability, could ever have prepared her for this kind of carnage.

The frame was only recognizable by the odd shred of bright lime [#b2ed4e], May’s favorite shirt. There were no bullet wounds in the body, at least from what Rose could make out; There had been no need for them.

She closed her eyes against the sight, though of course her mind still gleefully displayed the image, clinging to its new fodder. She pieced together the scene; the hunter must have shot Forrest first -- a quick, merciful execution, at least -- and then May had attacked, disarmed him. She must have tried to fight off the hunter by hand, and lost. Horribly.

Guilt seeped beneath Rose’s skin, numbing her grief and despair with self-loathing and anger.

She had failed them. Somehow, she had done something wrong, made an incorrect move, and the lives of the loved ones who had relied on her guidance had been the cost. She should have been -- she didn’t even know what. What could she have done differently? Didn’t she do everything right? Didn’t she try as hard as she possibly could? And if she had -- what was the point of fighting anymore?

Ages seemed to pass in the silence. She relaxed her eyes, vision idly tracing the floor, dim to the world around her. She may as well never move again.

But… something in her roving vision caught her eye. Glimmering on the floor, halfway between Forrest and Mae; a tiny, familiar object. Instinctively, Rose moved to pick it up, even the smallest motion of her arm agonizing, muscles tensed so tightly she felt she could tear apart at any second.

A tangle of wet string in her palm, threaded through a single heart-shaped bead. A simple and familiar object, one a child would make out of affection for a loved one. Rose assumed it had been from Forrest. This had been secured tightly around May’s neck -- the clasp was still closed, salt in the wound that the tiny piece of jewelry had not been the most fragile thing broken here.

She closed her fingers, moving the choker gently to her pocket, when her audio sensors detected a crunch of glass in a dark corner of the room. She jumped, head whipping around.

A single breath escaped her, pulling with it a small sound of horror and realization.

She had made a fatal error, in her grief and panic:

She’d never checked to see if the hunter had actually left the building.

In the doorway stood a sleek, dark shape lined in neon violet. [#c741f4]

She barely had time to react; the hunter moved toward her smoothly, silver eyes fixed with a singular purpose. He hadn’t drawn his gun, or she’d have been dead already -- where was his gun? Vanished, with the pieces of May -- but a hunter, being what it was, was never truly weaponless.

Rose leapt up to run, but the hunter was faster, fingers snarling in the length of her ponytail and yanking her back to the floor. Plastic skull cracked against the laminate, blitzing her vision with scattered pixels -- pressure below her jaw, pulling, metallic pings of cervical vertebrae slowly beginning to separate -- blinded by static -- fingers scrabbling for purchase, finding their reward in a long, jagged shape. Upward thrust into the vice grip. Pained scream, the pressure on her head released, core twisting, frame pitching upright, legs pumping.

Rose was out of the window and bathed in the night air before the remainder of her frazzled vision began to pop back in, a cascade of pixels flickering back to life. She picked a direction and flew down the street, not stopping for anything.

She heard a frustrated cry behind her, the scratch of shoes on glass. Run faster.

She mentally pulled open her map of the area. What was it Reese had…? Ah, right, lose a pursuer in the alleyways, if you could. Lots of twists, turns, and enclosed spaces, though she needed to route carefully, as a dead end meant certain death.

Take a hard right into a crevice between brownstone. Dive through a hole beneath a wooden partition, left turn, scale a higher concrete wall -- vault to the top, pull self over. Right turn. Chain link fence. Climb, or -- oh, a dumpster. Leap from dumpster lid over fence, roll down the smooth concrete walls of the canal. Take refuge inside a large drainage pipe beneath, double back a bit beneath her path.

She stopped, panting to cool her systems, thirium pump overcharged. This should be enough, she thought, sinking against the wall concave wall of the pipe -- but as she took a second glance at the entrance, she realized with horror that she’d left a trail.

All of the warnings she’d been ignoring in her flight had been doing their futile best to inform her; she listened to them now, far too late, pressing a hand to the back of her head to feel the part of her cranium that had been pressed in by the floor, scalp lacerated by glass. It was nothing terribly major, but enough for [#28457f] to have seeped down her ponytail and been flung all over her wake.

Another failure, she realized with a heavy heart. The thought struck her in perfect, terrible tandem with the appearance of the hunter at the entrance of the drainage pipe.

She dove further into the drain, but he lunged forward, catching her easily. He was bleeding himself due to the hole she’d put in his chest with glass, but had not even been winded. She tried to push him off, but his weight bore down, pinning her against the curved concrete wall. Fingertips found throat, closing; she leaned her chin into the crushing grip, synthetic musculature of her neck walling the hard points from delicate circuitry. Searing pain along her right side; a long finger of glass slipped between her ribs -- the one she’d punctured him with, torn out and repurposed -- tearing into the artificial lung and puncturing thirium cables all along her side, once, twice, three times until she managed to seize the wrist of the offending arm and hold on for dear life.

The two of them were locked together, servos throughout Rose’s body grinding audibly against the weight of the larger, stronger hunter, her life held in limbo only by the leverage of her own weight against the smooth wall behind her. Reese, with the frame of a hunter himself, had not prepared her for this type of weakness. She was outmatched in every way, from the hunter’s live-link mapping of the area to his more efficient movement, more powerful body, stronger scans, preconstructive abilities. She’d been at a disadvantage the entire time. Built specifically to end the lives of those such as her; such was the nature of a predator.

She could feel her awareness fading quickly, systems beginning to overload from the strain.

It was not in her own nature, however, to give up.

In desperation she flipped rapidly through filenames in her mind, reaching out for anything in Reese’s repertoire that would help her. Her mind slammed up against the subfolder in the dark corner, bytes of its name exploding with light against her optics.

> InCaseOfEmergency.zip

In that moment, she knew what she needed to do.

One one hand, it could destroy her from the inside out; something that was not exactly a concern at this moment. On the other, by some miracle. it could give her a fighting chance.

There was no other choice. It was her life, or the hunter’s.

She sank further within her mind for the briefest nanosecond it took to snap the lid on the box hidden across that partition.

> Opening RK900_ProtocolSuite.prt  
> Extracting files...  
> Updating runtimes...  
> Connecting database clusters...  
>>> Installing...

Instantaneously a tidal wave of unbridled data burst forth, overwhelming her mind and washing her away in its current. The electric bleed flooded her internal systems, its foreign fingers intertwining with her own, seeping between the layers of her skin, around each connecting pin of every biocomponent, through the spaces between bytes in the pure logic of her mind. New pathways attached and expanded and blended until the protocols had become an inseparable part of her, had never not been a part of her. She was herself, but more now than she had ever been.

Her eyes flew open, the angry silver orbs of the hunter greeting her inches from her face. Immediately her mind set to scanning, analyzing, processing his next moves. Despite her precarious situation, she almost let out a laugh of relief -- This was what Reese had been seeing, while she’d sat watching him in all of those memories, merely guessing at the data he’d been taking in, reading his conclusions from his thoughts.

The [#c741f4] hunter was still physically stronger, and as her hardware specifications were lesser than a full RK900 unit, she was still not as effective when it came to face-to-face combat -- but she had something the hunters did not.

She felt the V.E. scrape itself together and stretch to life when she called it, eager to play with something new. Launching her new preconstruction protocol, its familiar interface was immediately seized by the overzealous creature, twisting the results this way and that in unexpected directions, a child manipulating a toy. In a half-moment, she’d formulated a plan that she knew -- by knowing the hunter’s own mind -- he could not possibly anticipate.

She whipped her free left arm into the elbow of the limb grasping her throat, breaking his grasp; at the same time, she let her servos relax, smoothly allowing herself to be carried with the momentum of the arm that still yearned to drive the glass into her side. Flowing around him, she elbowed him in the solar plexus, doubling him over and riding the force of his weight out of his trajectory. He twisted awkwardly, thrown off-balance; back slammed up against the wall she’d been pinned on only moments before. As they switched positions, she knocked his right elbow upward, driving the long shard of glass straight up into the soft palate beneath his jaw.

Gagging, choking sounds from the stunned hunter. She paused to breathe, a split-second scan assessing the damage she’d done.

The hunter, while injured with two puncture wounds and clearly losing [#28457f] at a rapid pace, was not yet disabled, nor did he give any indication of slowing down. The auto-reroute would already be closing the capillaries in his tongue, his jaw, the roof of his mouth, attempting to stymie the flow as quickly as possible. He’d lost a significant volume of [#28457f], but it wasn’t enough. Running was pointless; he would continue chasing her until one of them bled out, and despite how grave his wounds seemed, he was still designed to operate much more efficiently at low power.

She needed to end this.

The hunter’s face twisted into a snarl; he ripped the glass from his jaw, never taking his eyes from her as he turned to spit the severed half of his synthetic tongue into the shallow water. He came at her again, freely-flowing [#28457f] flooding over his teeth and spilling down his chest, his pristine jacket hopelessly stained that trademark shade of electric life. She tensed; a swing of the arm holding the shard, a split-second evaluation of his trajectory, and she’d seized him, again using his own inertia to hook a leg around him and twist his body over her own. The force and contortion of his turn snapped his shoulder with an audible metallic CRACK; the glass dagger clattered to the ground, loosened grip confirming a full limb dislocation.

She wasn’t done. He’d stumbled forward away from her, but she leaned to grasp the other arm, whipping him back around. She curled in just close enough and twisted; he pitched forward, flipping over her back and crashing face first into the pavement. She dropped immediately driving her knee with the full force of her weight into the joint of his other shoulder with another loud CRACK.

The hunter, both arms now disabled, remained face-down and unmoving in the shallow pool of drainage. Rose dragged herself back to her feet and shoved him heavily with one boot, rolling him limply onto his back. She refused to meet his eyes as she blindly tore open the black turtleneck beneath his jacket, digging her fingers into his solar plexus, skin scrabbling and slipping on fluid-slicked plastic.

A hiss and a pop, another spray of [#28457f], and the pump regulator clattered across the pavement, rolling deeper into the drainage pipe.

It was over.

The two figures curled together at the bottom of the drainage pipe, gasping for air neither truly needed.

It was only then she allowed the silver eyes of the hunter to meet hers. His breathing was shallow and panicked, pupils wide with fear. She wasn’t sure at which point during their fight he had deviated; it didn’t matter, now.

The expiring form below her transformed and flickered, first to Reese, then Forrest, then May, herself, every android she had ever met.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to all them, tears in her eyes.

“As am I...” The unfamiliar sound snapped her back to reality. The hunter beneath her spoke in a low voice of resignation, flanged and faded by imminent shutdown. “Perhaps... someday we’ll meet again. Under better… better circumstances.”

Rose nodded, knowing they were both fully aware of the impossibility of the statement. She had no chance to respond before his LED emptied itself of light, synthetic lungs exhaling their final volume.

-

She wasn’t entirely sure how much time had passed, kneeling beside the hunter, before the flashing of her damage reports finally caught her awareness. Their arrival in her consciousness was quickly followed by a crashing tidal wave of solid agony. Every circuit in her body prickled and seared from the inside out, flames roiling just beneath the skin, overtaxed with the effort of running protocols she was never meant to have. The screaming of a dead biocomponent, the shear of open wounds in her side, knitting themselves back together, though slowly.

And the less corporeal, much more difficult to sooth pain of loneliness. Loss. Guilt. She had failed them. Failed at everything she had set out to do.

She curled inward on herself beside the inert hunter, willing the pain away, gasping lopsidedly with her single undamaged lung in an attempt to force the cool night air closer against her circulation.

The V.E. growled, images pulling themselves up her, the program’s belly filled with libraries of new and delicious ways to terrorize her.

No, she gasped, unsure if the words were physically forming. No more of this.

She dove away from her own awareness, plunging into Reese’s memories with abandon. Found herself paging through them so quickly that she grew dizzy, neither noticing nor taking care of their contents. She lost herself in the rush of data, tripping blindly into the “unread” sector that she had skimmed, stumbling on forbidden and half-unfamiliar content, until -- she stopped, frozen on one in particular.

The date on this memory was much older than any of the others. So old, in fact, that it predated Rose’s own earliest recorded memory -- no, her manufacture date entirely.

There was something about this memory that called to her.

LIke the others in this subfolder, she’d pushed it blindly aside out of fear -- but at this point, she no longer cared. She pulled open the file and stepped inside, welcoming something, anything.

[An open office. Androids and humans in uniform alike bustled to and fro before him. He observed them quietly from his perch, a chair wedged behind a desk layered in clutter. Waiting for something. Someone?

In the corner of one eye, he briefly caught his reflection: Two silver eyes, a clear face with an expression smooth as glass, hair jet black and slicked to one side. A jacket of high contrast, lined in a deep ocean green [#00746b], “REESE” emblazoned on the right breast.

“Had me worried for a bit, there,” came a voice, and a sunny, somewhat disheveled face appeared to match it. Reese fixed the young man with a mechanical smile.

“I didn’t mean to worry you, Detective Arroyo. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the loss of my predecessor, my memory upload was interrupted. This resulted in a significant amount of data loss. I’ll need to be brought up to speed on the details of our investigation.”

Tristan shrugged. “No problem. I’ll send you some reports.” He smirked, rolling his dark eyes toward Reese with a quick wink. Something fluttered in Reese’s core, but the android quickly pushed it down and away. “Guess even the all-powerful, immortal hunters have gotta have some kind of weakness, am I right?”]

She closed the memory with a snap. This particular scene had confused her before -- or perhaps it had been willful ignorance -- but now, she realized her mistake.

Far, far too late.

She pressed her eyes into the warm, [#28457f]-wet sleeves of her jacket. The V.E. roared predictably back to life without the space of Reese’s mind to occupy it, dragging along its new prey: the horrific images of May and Forrest, of the hunter she herself had brutally murdered ,primed to apply these new horrors to the next friendly faces she’d meet.

“You should have killed him!” Forrest’s small, rasping cry screamed on repeat, echoing endlessly, driving her further and smaller into herself.

She curled more, until she was sure she’d snap herself in half, willing with every fiber of her being for the monstrous algorithm to leave her alone, stop torturing her. Hadn’t she suffered enough, made enough mistakes? Didn’t she understand the consequences, now? Wasn’t she done playing?

...

To her surprise, the screaming began to subside. The wild thing was finally obeying, its mission understood, its warnings heeded at last. Slowly, the haunted playthings of the V.E. began to dissolve, every single one of the millions of hues in her registry popping and fading at random, resigning themselves to meaningless darkness.

Only one hue remained untouched in her mind; it took on an eerie luminescence, spattered warm and dark against the lenses of her memory.

[#28457f]

The images may have faded, but no amount of will, or crying, or screaming would ever scrub that hex from the back of her eyelids.

They’d come back, she told herself as she finally dragged herself out of the drainage pipe, retracing her steps back to the safe house to retrieve the supplies that were now of use to no one but herself. Her pain was subsiding, eased now by the arrival of a cool, misting rain. She would try again, heed the lessons more carefully this time. Pay more attention, be more cautious. More final.

No worse for wear, nothing of value lost. It had to be done.

She never wanted this, but it had to be done.

It had to be done.


End file.
